


Absolution

by Taricha



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Post-Blood and Wine (The Witcher 3 DLC), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 22:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 6,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14318400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taricha/pseuds/Taricha
Summary: Dettlaff keeps coming into Anna Henrietta's room at night, and she cannot find a way to make him stay away.





	1. Chapter 1

Anna pulled the comb brutally through her curls. Once she’d had servants for this task, but lately she could not stand the seeming betrayal of letting anyone else’s hands do it.  Syanna had always loved the waviness of Anarietta’s honey brown hair, but had the gentlest of touches when it came to a snarl, taking the time to parse through the strands until they were separated again. Anna had neither the patience nor the inclination, and ripped through the day’s tangles with single-minded purpose.

A breeze lifted the loose strands of her hair. She didn’t remember opening the window, but it was cracked nonetheless and winter’s chilled air was seeping into the room. Winters in Toussaint were not as foully snow-ridden as those further north but the cold this year felt worse than normal.

She heard the footsteps just as she closed the latch on the window. “I told you to leave me be,” she snarled. Her guard captain had taken to nannying her in the months since Syanna’s murder, and it took a much sharper tongue to keep him in line and her privacy intact. She spun around from the vanity, expecting to reprimand her ever-hovering guard captain only to find it was not him.

The man – creature – who stood before her was dressed all in simple black robes, and his face was covered in a thick hood. She knew him nonetheless – his wickedness radiated from him too palpably to let his disguise succeed.

“Beast,” she growled, her heartrate speeding up, her voice catching in her throat before her anger pushed past it. “Have you come to collect the second sister then, to add to your vast collection of foul deeds?”

The vampire dropped his hood. His face, though pale and drawn, was still human – if you could call it such a thing to begin with. “No,” he said.

Anna’s fingers shook where they clutched the comb, and she thought briefly of calling for her guards before discarding the idea. If the monster was here to kill her, the guards would not stop him – that horrible night so many months ago had proven that. No, calling for the guards would only get them killed as well.

_Blast that witcher for not taking the Beast’s head when he could have._

“Then what have you come for? To gloat, perhaps – to torment me?” She held her chin high, refused to let her voice break. Syanna had deserved so much more, but the least Anna could do was not show her fear in front of her murderer.

“Also no,” the vampire said. He held his hands clasped in front of him, worrying at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. “I… I came to…” he stopped, the small muscles of his cheek twitching perceptibly, visible even across the distance that separated them.

“What?” Anna demanded, imperious despite the current of fear that was twisting her belly. “You came to what, vampire?” The air was cold, and she was dressed for bed in her nightgown but she refused to cross her arms over her chest, refused to show weakness in what could be her last moments alive.

“I am not sure,” the vampire said, as if he himself found his actions puzzling.

Irritation overwhelmed her fear. “You just… dropped by. To see the sister of the woman you murdered. To see the Duquessa of the city you rampaged through. And you did this on a whim?”

He moved too quickly to see, as if his body only existed in this world in flashes: one moment standing before her, and then next he had her pinned against the wall by a hand around her throat. The comb fell uselessly from her fingers and she scrambled for purchase against his hand, finding his grasp steely and unmovable.

“You were next on her list,” he said calmly, his face still stern, no expression other than the furrowing of his brow and the tightness of his jaw. “She would have had me kill you, rip out your heart. Instead I killed her, and you call me murderer.”

“As do our people,” Anna bit out. His hand wasn’t quite tight enough to cut off her oxygen, just enough to keep her from breaking free. “Whom you and yours slaughtered by the dozens, lest you have forgotten!”

“She should have come to me,” the vampire growled. “Lives would have been spared – “

Anna spat in his face, and his brow furrowed even deeper, just a shade shy of truly monstrous as her saliva trailed down his cheek like a tear.

“How dare you,” she hissed, “how dare you blame her for your own actions, how dare you claim innocence in this matter. You alone made your choices in the end – the choice to ravage, the choice to kill her!” She thrashed against his hand, loathing his touch, yearning to scratch out his eyes with her nails even if they would grow right back.

“She knew what I was!” the vampire roared, flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. “She knew, and she manipulated me, and…”

“And so you murdered innocents without her command, to spite her,” Anna sneered, unafraid of the way the vampire’s face was contorting into rat-like incisor fangs and a thicker brow. Let him kill her, the brute – at least then she and her sister would be reunited.

There came a loud knock at the door. “ _Duquessa?”_

“I am fine,” she shouted quickly, “leave me be!”

The vampire frowned, his features retreating into his normal mockery of humanity. “You would send them away?”

“Of course. I will not have you kill them too.”

“I will not,” the vampire said, his dark eyes bearing an emotion that Anna could not place, even if she had cared to evaluate it. “I would not – that is not why I came here.”

“So you have said, and yet I feel your claws against my throat.”

The vampire’s hand dropped immediately to his side, darting away like a startled bird. Hesitantly, he wiped his cheek with the sleeve of his shirt, and moved further away from her.

“I hate you,” Anna seethed, her hands going to her throat and feeling for the ring of bruises she knew would be growing there. “I hate it more that I cannot kill you, that my guards cannot kill you, that if I were to ask for your head it would only cause more innocent deaths and yours would still be denied me. I despise you, monster – no wonder Syanna did as well.”

“She loved me,” the vampire said, then quickly corrected, “Once. She loved me once. I know that now.”

“Her greatest error. And you have come to this realization too late, monster, for I assure you she is still quite dead. Any affection she may have held for you means nothing in the face of your crimes.”

“She betrayed me,” he said. “I could not find it in myself to forgive her, knowing what she made me do. I still cannot, but I… I know now it was not all a ruse, not in the beginning.”

Hatred sprouted in her chest, turning her voice rough. “Does that give you some measure of comfort, to know that the woman you carved into may have cared for you at one time?”

“No,” he said quietly, staring at the floor. His form began to evaporate. “It does not.”

“Good,” she snarled. “May it plague you for the rest of your bedamned life.”

She caught one last glimpse of dark, glistening eyes and then the vampire turned to smoke and fled the room.


	2. Chapter 2

Captain de La Tour opened his mouth only once to ask _why_ she was requesting external reinforcement for windows in her 4th-story room, and then shut it immediately upon her incendiary glare. He ordered the architects to get to work, hounding them so violently that the work was completed two days ahead of schedule.

Her Captain was efficient, but more so as of late. It was still a great shame to him that he had not been able to do more during that long night of terror that the vampire had unleashed on their city. The failure weighed on him, but Anna knew that it was no weakness to fall back in the face of overwhelming odds. She had ordered several medals as a commendation of his service, but he had still worked twice as hard ever since as if by throwing himself into his work he could bury the ramifications and self-doubt of that night.

The exhausted workers closed her now silver-lined windows and assured her they could not be opened from the outside. She could not burden de la Tour with the reason for her renovations, but she could be grateful for his expediency and dedication, as she ever was.


	3. Chapter 3

It was dark in the room, so much so that as Anna rolled over it took her several minutes for her sleep-befuddled eyes to resolve on the figure sitting at the foot of her bed.

Her heart startled in her chest, all vestiges of sleep dissipating as the vampire came into focus. She froze, unsure whether to move – she could see the outline of his face highlighted by moonlight in the window, perhaps he had not yet seen her –

His face disappeared into an amorphous dark smear as it turned away from the moonlight. Her heart raced frantically at the movement, a rabbit cornered by a dog.

“Be calm,” the vampire said quietly, not moving towards her. “I did not come to harm you.”

Anna pushed herself up against the back of the bed, more frantically than she would have liked but less rapidly than the thrumming terror in her veins would otherwise prefer. She had lined the windows with silver, hung garlic around the palace. Useless remedies for what plagued her, clearly.

He turned back to his contemplation of the adjacent wall, moonlight casting highlights over a strong nose and chin. His face looked almost peaceful in the darkness. “I am sorry for my actions before,” he said. “I lost my temper. I did not mean to harm you.”

Anna swallowed, pulling the blankets up higher around her chest. “Do you mean when you held me by the throat? Or when you murdered my beloved sister?”

“Both, I suppose, though I spoke of the former.”

A great number of hot retorts flooded through her mind, but she did not let the venom spill out. Why, she did not know – perhaps she did not truly wish to die after all. “Why are you here?” she finally asked, though she imagined she would get no more straight an answer than before.

“I miss her,” he said dully, staring at the wall.

“I am not her,” she said.

“No,” the vampire replied. “But you are her sister.”

 _Sister and betrayer. Absent of compassion, possessing of a heart of ice._ She had ordered the letter burned but she could not un-see the words. In the end Syanna had not thought of her as a sister but as a monster to be punished with the harshest of means. Anna thought on it often.

Perhaps she had been a monster.

Perhaps she was now being punished.

“But that does not explain your presence,” Anna said, the late hour erasing the hautiness from her voice. “You miss the woman you murdered? Go visit her grave. Perhaps her wraith will yet keep you company, but I do not wish to.”

It was only after the vampire had left that Anna realized what he was staring at. She’d had the portrait hung once the witcher had revealed her sister to be alive and in the duchy, as a semblance of hope for what might come to pass. Now, she refused to take it down, though the sight of the portrait of the two of them as such small girls was painful every time she glanced at it.

“I miss her too,” Anna said to the vacant space at the end of her bed. Though in all likelihood, she did not miss the same person as the vampire – he missed his Rhenawedd, and she her childhood companion. Whether she liked it or not, they were different people. And neither of them truly had known the woman who had died, the woman that Syanna had become.


	4. Chapter 4

She hired a witcher. A different one, of course, who had built no reputation for himself but whom her guards had tracked down as a matter of chance as he was passing through the northern portion of the duchy. She gathered from his irritated expression as he was marched in by de la Tour that his accompaniment to her palace had not entirely been by choice, but no matter – the coin she had secured for his task would be more than enough to make up for any rough handling. Anna greeted him on the western patio, where she spent much of her time now. She could not see the city from here, only gardens, and the wind was particularly strong and stung her cheeks in the afternoon.

She waved at the treasurer as the witcher was marched towards her, and he brought out the small chest of coins she had requested. The witcher was dark of hair and had horrific scars across the right side of his face, but she still saw surprise in the corners of his eyes as he looked at the coins.

“I wish to know how to prevent vampires from entering a room,” she told him. “Can you do this?”

“What, stand guard?” the witcher said. 

“I need a preventative measure, not an additional security guard. I am told garlic, seeds, these things are of no use. I wish to know what is.”

“Depends on the vampire,” the witcher said. “Lesser vampires, alps, that sort of thing can be kept out by putting silver on the doors.”

“And higher vampires?”

The witcher paused, watching her silently for a moment before saying, “Can’t be kept out of anything, far as I know.”

Her guard captain scoffed. “Your Highness, let us be done with these witchers and request a sorcerer from the Empress. It is clear that the witcher guild has decreased in quality in the last decades.”

The witcher did not seem much perturbed by the insult, simply shrugging in response. “The only thing that can keep out a higher vampire is them wanting to not be there – so if you’ve got one bothering you, either hire someone to kill it or convince it to leave you alone.”

“Someone? Not you?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t take on death sentences, which is what a higher vampire contract usually is.”

“And if I wished to have this vampire put down? Who would you recommend I contact?” She knew the answer already.

The witcher cocked his head to the side before drawling slowly - as if he thought his words were humorous - “Last I heard, the expert on higher vampires was living here in Touissant. Put down his swords, took to pruning grapes.”

Anna ground her teeth. “Begone, then, if you cannot help me.” She would have to find another means.


	5. Chapter 5

The inevitable evening draft from the window sent a shiver up her spine, both from the chill and from a violent, chest-clenching fury. Anna had not yet fallen asleep, but now she was not likely to as the Beast had yet again come to gloat. Well, if she could not chase him out with silver or angry words, perhaps her silence would do the trick.

Anna rolled over, shoved her face into the pillow, and ignored the vampire.

Or rather, she tried to. His every movement was blindingly apparent to her – she heard the soft creak of the floor as he walked across it, and smelled a wave of pine that preceded his movement across the room. The bed sagged as he sat on the end, and then there was silence. He did not move, he did not breathe, his heart did not pump. 

Anna found herself holding her breath, and let it out slowly, trying to maintain a semblance of dispassion. He had to know she was awake, but she would give him no satisfaction. Without looking at him she pulled the covers up to her ears against the draft, and tried to convey her sincere and utter disinterest in the way she kept her back to him.

She knew she should take the portrait down. de la Tour had been gently suggesting she redecorate her room for several weeks, though from his point of view the only danger the portrait possessed was to her own emotional state. If only he knew. And if the witcher was right, the only thing she could do to keep the vampire from her room was remove his reason for coming. 

But Anna did not want to take the portrait down. She did not want to forget her past mistakes, or her pain. Perhaps the vampire would, in the absence of her attention, simply drink his fill of the picture and begone. That would be the most satisfactory option – well, in lieu of his head, which wasn’t an option currently available to her. This would have to do.

The vampire did not speak. Perhaps he was too enraptured by her sister’s likeness, or perhaps he was simply a sullen creature. Though he had spoken quite freely of Nazair that night after the Masquerade – but she supposed that was simply the nature of the Beast, to be just charming enough to beguile the unsuspecting before letting the guillotine drop.

Eventually, her professed inattention became real, and soon thereafter she drifted into sleep, lulled away by the vampire’s silent contemplation. He was gone when she woke up, and the bed was cold as if he had not come at all.


	6. Chapter 6

de la Tour was clearly aware there was an issue, though he had not yet determined what it was. During the nights, she was harried by a petulant Beast, and during the day her anxious Guard Captain secured himself to her side like glue. 

Yet there was nothing that could be done. There was no remedy for this ailment, and should she bring it up more directly she would only cause her captain to throw himself into a line of fire he could not prevent. Or, worse, she would resurrect painful feelings of inadequacy she had tried very hard to stifle in the man. 

No, telling her captain, telling her maids – these were not options. And the only man she could tell was one she had cast out of Beauclair for all time. But her pride would not allow her to contact Geralt of Rivia over this. She told herself instead that the vampire was an irritant, but one that would soon clear. Absent of any danger to herself, it would be impractical to call on the witcher – a duchess could too easily gain a reputation for being mercurial, were she to reverse the ban just yet.

Not to mention the bastard would be unlikely to resolve the problem, only exacerbate it and laugh at her misery.


	7. Chapter 7

Ignoring the vampire had become a matter of habit now, but Anna wasn’t sure she could ignore _this_ – she could feel his gaze burning into her skin as the vampire stared at her.

Finally, she stopped pretending to be asleep and opened her eyes into narrow, disapproving slits. He was only a foot away, his face level with hers and cast in shadows.

“Stop it,” she snapped.

He cocked his head to the side. “Are you speaking to me again?” He did not move back.

“Only to tell you that your gaze is infuriating, and that if I could carve out your eyes I would,” she said, refusing to show weakness by moving any further, no matter how uncomfortable his proximity was.

“I was studying your face,” the monster said. She could feel the breath of his words on her skin – perhaps he did not need to breath as a normal creature did, but he certainly needed air to operate his unfortunately talkative voice box. “I cannot study your face from across the room.”

“You cannot study my face at all! Begone, Beast.”

“Your sister did not like it either,” the vampire said, still unmoving. “She said she found it unnerving. I do not know what is so unsettling about simply being looked upon.”

Incensed, Anna pushed herself to her elbows, trying to seem as regal as one could in their nightgown with bedhead. “Are you requesting I explain human social interactions to you? Why, so you can more thoroughly pass yourself off as man rather than monster, and lure another woman to you for eventual sacrifice as you did Syanna?”

“Rhen- Syanna knew me to be a vampire when we first met,” the Beast said, but at least he did move back a bit. “She held no illusions as to my nature. And why would I wish to become more like a man? The cruelty of one human to another is limitless – at least my brethren hold to a code of honor amongst one another.”

Anna scowled. “We hold our knights to the five chivalric virtues – “

“Your knights tormented Syanna, before leaving her to die in the cold. What virtue is there in that?”

Anna slammed her head back into the pillow, anger causing every muscle in her jaw to tense. “I am to be told of honor by the man who killed the woman he loved? Is revenge a chivalric virtue amongst vampires?”

“She made me into a tool to murder men, to murder you even - “

“Only because you poisoned her, corrupted her - “

“I did no such thing,” the vampire snapped. “You said once that I had made my own choices. So did she. I did not poison her mind against you, or press her to murder.”

Anna swallowed, and rolled onto her back, refusing to look at him. “I do not believe you. Syanna would never do such a thing, not on her own.”

“You are unwilling to see it, see her for what she truly became,” the vampire said.

“She was my sister,” Anna managed, then rolled away from the beast, too upset to chance a glance at his face. She would not let him see her cry. “You cannot possibly understand what that means.”

There was silence in the room for a long moment. Were it not for the smell of pine, she might have thought he had left.

“I have a brother,” he said softly. “I understand more than you might imagine.”

“Then why,” she whispered, her eyes staring out into the darkness, “why do you torment me like this?”

“You are the only one who knew her,” he said, and despite herself she could hear the pain in his voice. “Who can I talk to if not you?”

“No one,” Anna said, squeezing her eyes tightly shut to hold in the wetness. “You may speak to no one, you deserve to speak to no one. You should never say her name again for what you did to her. I will not give you absolution, Beast, not ever. May her name turn to ash in your mouth for all you have done.”

“And you, Anna? Who will pardon you for all you have done?”

The words were a dagger to her heart, crushing into her chest and paralyzing her breath. It was true, she knew – her sins against her sister were many, a string of failures that Syanna had seen as clearly and as painfully as she had.

“No one,” she managed to say eventually. “No one.” _And such is what I deserve._


	8. Chapter 8

He did not come back the next night, nor the night after that, yet his absence gave her no relief. The vampire’s words swirled in her head, refracted by her brain until _who can I talk to_ was no longer in his voice but her own.

Nobody remaining in this world truly knew her sister save herself – she would not do the monster the service of saying he had ever truly known Syanna, for that would give a dignity to him that she could not allow. Her captain had known Syanna only ever as a threat to the duchy, and her court only knew Syanna as a murderer and conspirator. Geralt of Rivia, perhaps, saw her as something else – but Anna could not speak to him.

It was maddening.

The vampire left her alone for a week. She stewed in guilt and anger during his absence, unable to enjoy her respite.

Then, the letters began to arrive.

She did not read her own mail of course, she had servants for that. They parsed through the notes and gave her anything that seemed particularly important, summarizing the day’s mail as she took her morning meal. Yet she knew from the sudden flush of her handmaid’s cheeks and the stillness of her frame that this letter was one she would have to read herself.

“Your Highness,” said her handmaid, putting the letter down, “I…”

“Thank you, Fiora, that will be all for today,” Anna said quickly, snatching the letter out of her hand with a brusqueness she knew would be considered rude in a less important woman.

Immediately she could see what had caused the woman to become so flustered.

The drawing was well-done, a minimalist portrait in charcoal. Her sister’s eyes were hooded, her lips slightly parted as if on an exhale. Her hair formed a dark cloud around her head, free and loose. The lines of her collarbones were deep slashes against the paper, a hint of malnourishment in the shadows of her shoulders. Lower, the illustrator had drawn only a hint of cleavage – enough to show the model had been nude – before shading the drawing out at the edges.

Below, he had written in surprisingly neat handwriting, “You have moles in different places. And your mouths are different – hers was thinner, and her lower lip was not so full.” The word ‘full’ was darker, as if the writer had dipped his pen deep into the inkwell as he considered his word choice.

There was no signature, and no return address. The letter had been addressed to The Duchess, a gross informality that would have been offensive enough to cause her maid to flush without the tasteful yet still nude drawing of her sister contained inside. It had been sealed with a red wax, pressed with the vampire’s fingerprint instead of a proper stamp.

She thought of throwing it into the fire, solely to punish the artist. Instead, she told Fiora that any more similarly sealed letters were to be directed to her at once, and tucked the drawing into her nightstand.

Anna had no other portraits of her sister as an adult, and she was not foolish enough to throw away this one despite the sender.

\-----------

The next letter came a few days later. Dried blossoms fell out of it – a branch of lyre flowers, their pink and white petals crushed and flattened.

“I did not know what type of flowers she liked. I never bought her any. She never asked for any. If she had a favorite, I would imagine it to be these, but perhaps that is my bitterness speaking.”

_Bitterness_? Why would lyre flowers be indicative of bitterness? True, they were short lived and hard to keep in a bouquet, given their preference for the cool shadows of the forest, but there was no shame she could see in liking them.

“Fiora,” she said, “is there another name for lyre flowers, perhaps?”

“Yes, your Enlightened Highness, there are several. Lady-in-a-bath, and of course, Bleeding Heart.”

“Ahh,” Anna said, placing the sprig of flowers back into the letter. “How very dramatic of him.”

“I beg your pardon, your Highness?”

“Nothing, Fiora, never mind.”

\-----------

The next letter came attached to a small package. She read the letter first.

“I do know her favorite animal. She loved horses. I don’t know why they appealed to her, but like most animals, horses can sense my true nature and are afraid of me. Perhaps our mutual antipathy has prevented me from seeing their fascination.

That, or perhaps it has been the smell.”

She snorted, and was immediately irritated at herself for the reaction. Instead of focusing too deeply on it, she unwrapped the package. Inside was a carved wooden horse with a rider on its back. It had been carefully painted, lovingly polished. She could see the mole on her sister’s cheek.

Anarietta had seen many beautiful artworks in her life. Many lovely things, heartbreakingly emotional things, had been commissioned specifically for her and in her honor. But this one – she closed the paper back around the figurine quickly, before the sight of it could release the tears that threatened to spill out.

\------------

The letters continued to come, each revealing a tiny shard of the vampire’s heart, and chipping away at an icy corner of hers. He included more sketches, and his art described his love in a way the words never could. How he remembered Sylvia Anna’s face so well, Anna did not know – she had never dedicated the time to memorize a person’s features in such detail, would not know how to do so if asked. Even Julian, whom she had loved so fiercely as to make a great fool of herself over– she only remembered his dark hair, his gentle words, and his soulful voice. She could no more paint the outline of his nose than she could describe a sunset she’d never seen. And try as she might, she could not form a mental picture of her sister, grown or otherwise.

But the Beast could.

His sketches captured an adult Syanna in moods Anna had not been graced to see – moments of joy, of love, or calm. Anna stared at the sketches each night when she was alone, becoming more familiar with the planes of her sister’s face than she was with her own. She kept all the letters in bundle in the stand by her bed, along with all the various trinkets the vampire continued to send – the flowers, the horse, a carved bone pendant he’d thought Syanna would have liked.

As the weeks passed, his letters became more maudlin, more tormented.

“She told me of her childhood, once. She told me of how she had been judged and cast aside, and said she was a monster too. I told her that humans are cruel. She did not take it well, and now I wonder if she thought I meant her – or perhaps, if I accidentally was speaking ill of you.”

“I knew her for only a few months, you know. They were sweet months, but months nonetheless. I, who have lived centuries, killed strangers over loving a woman I barely knew. What a fool I have been.”

“I let myself become a monster for her. I do not know if I ever will forgive her, or myself, yet I still wish that I had known her better – not so that I could have prevented what was to come, but so I could have an excuse, a reason, for the atrocities I have done in her name. It is hard to justify my actions, but it is harder still to justify it when I did it out of love for someone I am now coming to realize I did not truly know.”

Anna felt great guilt over how deeply she treasured the letters, coming as they did from poisoned hands. She could not even truly say she kept them all as remembrances of her sister, for they did not all contain such things.

Regardless, Anna read the letters over and over, muttering the words to herself like a child pushing at a loose tooth just to see if it still ached. It did, but less so with each re-read. Forgiveness was not part of her nature – even Julian was still banned from the Duchy, despite his short visit to plead for the life of his friend. Yet as she read these letters she felt a burden beginning to lift from her shoulders – though she did not know whom of the three of them she was forgiving.


	9. Chapter 9

It was inevitable that he would return to her in person. Over time, she even grew to privately wish for it. She found, as she read his letters, that she had much she wished to say to him, and not all of it was full of hatred and bile. 

She was not surprised that he returned to her while she was sleeping – if anything, the abundance of letters had reinforced that he did not wish to fight her, and she certainly couldn’t argue if she was unconscious. However, she was a light sleeper these days and so the soft sound of footprints pulled her quickly into wakefulness. The noise stopped as she stirred, then there was a whisper of wind, and she realized he was turning to vapor and running.

“Wait!” she called.

The cloud of particles hesitated.

“Her,” Anna licked her lips, and struggled upright. “Her favorite flowers. They were lilies.”

The vampire slowly reassembled himself before her eyes. He stood in the windowlight, and she remembered what she had seen of him the first night they’d met, when he’d simply been a stranger from Nazair. He’d seemed fragile to her, a man easily broken into a thousand pieces by the secrets he’d held within him. Now, she could see the truth to her initial impression.

“All types of lilies. The brighter the better,” Anna continued, watching the man for his reaction, “and preferably thick with perfume and pollen. Our governess would buy them for her when she was well behaved, which was not very often.”

She could see a fine tremor run through the man’s frame. It pried her tongue loose from the top of her mouth, kept the words spilling out. “She was always brash, impulsive. Far braver than I ever was. I would have followed her to the end of the world and back.”

“She was,” he said, and his voice cracked. “She was magnificent.”

Anna’s heart clenched. “She was. But she… she could be cruel, too.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and of course he knew – to whom had Syanna been crueler?

“It does not make me love her any less,” Anna confessed brokenly, wringing the blankets in her hands. “She was still my darling sister.”

“I know,” he said, his voice full of pain.

“Dettlaff,” she said, and she saw him freeze at the use of his name. “Please. Come, sit.”

He jerked forward as if pulled by puppet strings, then hesitated, so obviously conflicted she could practically see his particles tearing themselves into two directions. Finally he moved towards her, sitting gingerly at the edge of the bed.

She reached out and took his hand in hers. It was cool and limp, and his eyes were wide like those of a baby deer who had thought itself too well hidden in the grass to ever be found. 

“You killed her,” Anna said around a lump in her throat, and Dettlaff tried to jerk his hand away. “No, wait,” she commanded. Her vision blurred, and she batted her eyelashes to clear away the tears before continued. 

“You killed her, and I have realized that I owe you some measure of gratitude for that,” she said, and swallowed again. “For if you had not, I might have been forced to. She had committed murders, both through your hands and through her own. Syanna was… she was poison, but I loved her. To punish her…” Anna’s resolve waivered, and she looked down. Dettlaff’s hands squeezed hers back, ever so gently. 

“It would have destroyed me,” she finished. “I cannot… I cannot condemn you for doing what I would have been forced to later face myself. In a way, you saved me from a great pain.”

Dettlaff squeezed her hands tightly, the tips of his nails pricking against her skin. For many moments, they sat there in the darkness, bound by their shared misery. Anna understood, now, what had brought him to her weeks ago – and, perhaps, what had brought Syanna to him to start with. She had once thought of his silence as grim. It was… restful. 

“Will you tell me of her?” he asked eventually. “I wish… I wish to know her.”

“I will,” Anna promised. “I will tell you everything.”


End file.
